"I never turned my back on you, Oleg. I was never with you in the first place. I was never a devotee."
Kovalenko smiled. He understood completely, but he pressed. "Then why did you help us so eagerly?"
"I was eager to get out of there. That"s all. You know that."
"You turned your back on us, just as you turned your back on your own people. Some would suggest you have turned yet again, turning away from the capitalism that made you in the West. Now you support everything that is not capitalism. You are quite a dancer for an old man. Just the same as when you were young."
Laska thought back to when he was young, in Prague. He thought back to his friends in the movement, his initial support of Alexander Dubek. Laska also thought about his girlfriend, Ilonka, and their plans to get married after the revolution.
But then he thought of his arrest by the secret police, the visit to his cell by a big, powerful, and dominant KGB officer named Oleg. The beating, the threats of imprisonment, and the promise of an exit visa if the young banker only informed on a few of his fellow rabble-rousers in the movement.
Pavel Laska had agreed. He saw it as an opportunity to go to the West, to New York City, to trade on the New York Stock Exchange, and to make a great deal of money. Kovalenko turned him with this enticement, and Laska had helped turn the tide against the Prague Spring.
And inside of two years the traitor was in New York.
Paul Laska shook Pavel Laska out of his mind. Ancient history. "Oleg. I am not here to see you. I need something else."
"I am going to let you pick up the check for my lovely room downstairs, I am going to let you reimburse me for my flight, I am going to drink your Champagne, and I am going to let you speak."
"Your son, Valentin, is SVR. High-ranking, higher than you ever made it in the KGB."
"Apples to oranges. Very different times. A very different industry."
"You don"t seem surprised that I know about Valentin."
"Not at all. Everything can be bought. Information as well. And you have the money to buy everything."
"I also know that he is a.s.sistant rezident in the UK."
Oleg shrugged. "You would think that he"d call on his old father when he learned that I was here. But no. Too busy." Kovalenko smiled a little. "I remember the life, though, and I was too busy for my father."
"I want to meet Valentin. Tonight. It must be in complete secrecy. He is to tell no one of our appointment."
Oleg shrugged. "If I can"t get him to see me, his dear father, how can I persuade him to see you?"
Laska just looked at the old man, the KGB officer who beat him in Prague in 1968, and he delivered his own blow. "Apples to oranges, Oleg Petrovich. He will see me."
General Riaz Rehan launched the opening volley of his Operation Saker with a phone call over a voice-over-Internet line with a man in India.
The man had many aliases, but forever more he would be known as Abdul Ibrahim. He was thirty-one, thin and tall, with a narrow face and deep-set eyes. He was also the operational chief for Lashkar-e-Taiba in southern India, and October 15 would be the last day of his life.
His orders had come in a phone call from Majid just three nights earlier. He"d met Majid several times before at a training camp in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, and he knew the man to be a high-ranking member of the Pakistani Army and a commander in the ISI. The fact that Ibrahim did not know that Majid"s real name was Riaz Rehan was unimportant, as unimportant as the fact that the four other men who would go on this mission did not know the other aliases of Abdul Ibrahim.
Ibrahim and his cell had been operating in the Karnataka region of India for some time. They were no sleepers; they"d bombed a railroad exchange, four electrical power stations, and a water treatment facility, and they"d shot a policeman and firebombed cars in front of a television station. For LeT it was small-time stuff, but Abdul Ibrahim had been ordered by Majid to perform hara.s.sing operations against the population in a manner that would not put his cell into too much jeopardy. He"d long a.s.sumed he was being kept safe and in place for a major operation, and when Majid called him on his voice-over Internet line three days prior, it had been the proudest moment of Abdul Ibrahim"s life.
Following orders received in the phone call, Abdul Ibrahim had picked his five best operators, and they all met at their safe house in Mysore. Ibrahim appointed one of the men his successor as chief of operations. The young man was shocked to be told he would be in charge of Lashkar-e-Taiba ops in southern India in two-days" time. The other four men felt lucky to be told they would be going with Abdul on a martyrdom operation in Bangalore.
They took the best weapons from the cache: four grenades, ten homemade pipe bombs, and a pistol and rifle for each of the five men. This along with nearly two thousand rounds of combined ammunition they packed into backpacks and suitcases along with a change of clothing. Within hours they were on a train to the northeast, and they arrived in Bangalore early in the morning of their second-to-last day.
A local man with Pakistani roots met them, took them to his home, and handed them the keys to three motorcycles.
Riaz Rehan himself had picked the target. Bangalore is often referred to as the Silicon Valley of India. With a population of six million, it possesses many of the largest technology companies in the huge nation, many located in Electronics City, a 330-acre industrial park in the western suburbs of Bangalore-more precisely in Doddathogur and Agrahara, former villages that had been swallowed up with the explosion of both population and progress here.
Rehan felt that Abdul Ibrahim and his four men would be slaughtered relatively quickly if they attacked this target. Electronics City had good security for a nongovernmental installation. But still, any success at all by Abdul Ibrahim and his men would send a symbolic message. Electronics City was a major outsourcing hub of India and the operations run from offices there involved hundreds of companies, large and small, around the world. Blowing up people and property here would affect, to one degree or another, many of the Fortune 500 companies, and this would ensure that the attack would have a huge amount of play in the Western media. Rehan reasoned that a single death here by the southern India cell of LeT would carry the value of twenty deaths of peasants in a Kashmiri village. He intended for Abdul Ibrahim"s act in Bangalore to create a thunderclap of terror that would reverberate across the globe and frighten the West, ensuring that India would not be able to downplay such an attack.
More attacks would follow, and with each attack the conflict between India and Pakistan would worsen.
Riaz Rehan understood all this because he was a Westernized jihadist, an army general, and an intelligence chief. All these t.i.tles attributed to just one man gave him another, more ominous ident.i.ty-Riaz Rehan, aka Majid, was, above all, a master terrorist.
When Abdul Ibrahim and his four men arrived in Bangalore and fueled up their motorbikes, they immediately began reconnaissance on their target, because they had no time to waste. They found that the industrial park was covered with heavily armed security, both private guards and police. Further, the Central Industrial Security Force, the Indian paramilitary force in charge of government industrial installations, airports, and nuclear site security, was now working under contract for certain well-heeled private businesses in Electronics City. The CISF had even established checkpoints at the entrance to the industrial park. Ibrahim was certain he and his men would not be able to breach any of the major buildings themselves. He was dejected, but nevertheless he decided to spend much of the time until the attack driving around the perimeter of Electronics City, searching for a way in.
He did not find a way in, but on the final morning, just hours before his planned attack, he decided to pa.s.s by his target one last time in daylight. He traveled alone on his motorcycle along the Hosur Main Road, took the huge, modern Bangalore Elevated Tollway, a ten-kilometer flyover that ran between Madiwala and Electronics City, and he immediately found himself surrounded by dozens of buses packed with workers heading to their jobs from Bangalore proper.
Instantly he saw his mission before him. Abdul Ibrahim returned to the safe house in the city and told his men that the plans had changed.
They did not attack that night as he"d promised Majid. He knew his handler would be furious with him for disobeying a direct order, but he obeyed his other order and made no contact with his handler, nor any other LeT a.s.set. Instead he destroyed his mobile phone, prayed, and went to sleep.
He and his men awoke at six a.m. They prayed again, drank tea in silence, and then climbed aboard the three motorcycles.
They arrived at the flyover at eight a.m. Abdul rode his own bike two hundred meters behind the second motorcycle, which itself was two hundred meters behind the first. He carried the pipe bombs and grenades in his backpack slung on his chest to where he could reach into the bag and pull them out while he drove.
The first bike pulled alongside an articulated bus with fifty pa.s.sengers inside. As the driver of the motorcycle advanced slowly along the long, two-sectioned vehicle, the rider pulled an AK-47 from a bag in his lap, its wire stock folded to shorten its length. The gunman calmly and carefully lined his sights up on the side of the bus driver"s head, and he pressed the trigger. With a short pop and a burst of gray smoke, the bus driver"s window shattered and the man tumbled out of his seat, and the huge bus careened sharply to the right and then jackknifed. It hit several other cars as it skidded at speed, then it slammed into the concrete wall of the flyover, striking more cars that had pulled quickly off the road in an attempt to get out of the way.
Some in the bus died in the crash, but most were merely wounded after having been thrown from their seats. The first motorcycle moved on, leaving the wounded bus behind as it continued up the road, attacking more vehicles in its path.
But the second motorcycle, also carrying a driver and a gunman, pa.s.sed by the crash thirty seconds later. The rear rider"s AK barked, and his seventy-five-round drum spun, releasing its supersonic bullets through the barrel. The rounds tore into the bus and into the wounded, killing the men and women as they tried in vain to scramble free of the wreckage, and killing those in other vehicles who had pulled over to help.
This second bike, too, rolled on, leaving the carnage behind as the rear gunner reloaded and prepared to attack the next scene of horror up the flyover.
But Abdul Ibrahim arrived at the articulated bus and the wreckage around it just moments later. He pulled up in the middle of the slaughter, just like dozens of other cars, vans, and motorcycles had done. The thin Lashkar-e-Taiba operative took a pipe bomb from his satchel, lit it with a lighter, and rolled it under a small Volkswagen bus that was parked in the jam, and then he drove away quickly.
Seconds later the VW exploded, the hot metal and shattered gla.s.s tore through the traffic jam, and fire ignited leaking gas from the articulated bus. Men and women burned alive across the two southbound lanes of the flyover as the Lashkar cell continued on, a rolling three-stage attack along the raised toll road.
They continued on like this for several kilometers; the first two bikes poured automatic weapons fire into moving busses, the vehicles stopped suddenly, careened left or right, many crashed into cars and trucks. Ibrahim cruised slowly and calmly through the wreckage left behind by his comrades, pulled to a stop next to one bus after another, smiled grimly at the screams and moans from inside the wreckage, and tossed in grenades and pipe bombs.
Twenty-four-year-old Kiron Yadava was driving himself to work that morning because he had missed his carpool. A jawan (enlisted soldier) with the Central Industrial Security Force, he worked the day shift as a patrolling constable at Electronics City, an easy job after two years of service deployed in a paramilitary unit. Normally he packed into a van with six of his mates at a bus stop in front of the Meenakshi Temple for the ride across town to work, but today he was running late and, consequently, traveling alone.
He had just paid his toll to get on the flyover, and he pushed the accelerator on his tiny two-seater Tata nearly down to the floorboard to climb the ramp to the restricted access road that traveled to Electronics City. As he drove he listened to a CD in his stereo, the riffs of Bombay Ba.s.sment were jacked up full volume, and he rapped along with the MC at the top of his lungs.
The track ended as Kiron merged into the thick traffic, and the next song had just begun, a thumping electronic reggae-infused dance beat. When the young man heard a low whump whump that seemed to defy the rhythm, he looked at his stereo. But when he heard it again, louder than the music coming through his speakers, he looked into his rearview mirror, and he saw black smoke rising from a dozen sources on the flyover behind him. The nearest plume was just a hundred yards back, and he saw a flaming minibus in the far right-hand lane.
Constable Yadava saw the motorcycle a moment later. Just forty meters away, two men rode a yellow Suzuki. The rear rider held a Kalashnikov, and he fired it from the hip at a four-door sedan that then sideswiped a bus as it swerved to escape the hot lead.
Yadava could not believe the images in his rearview mirror. The motorcycle streaked closer and closer to his tiny car, but Constable Yadava just kept driving, as if he were watching an action show on television.
The Suzuki bike pa.s.sed by his car. The rider was hooking a fresh mag into his AK, and he even made eye contact with Yadava in his tiny two-seater, before the pair of terrorists wove in front of other cars and out of view.
The CISF jawan heard more shooting behind him now, and finally he reacted to the action. The Tata pulled off the road on the left, just ahead of another car that had done the same. Yadava climbed out, then reached back in, grabbing his work bag. After unzipping the bag he reached in, his fingers felt past his plastic lunch container and his sweater, and they wrapped around the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun that he carried while on duty. He grabbed his weapon as close rifle fire and incessant honking of horns a.s.saulted his ears.
With the gun and his single reserve magazine of thirty rounds of ammo, Yadava sprinted into traffic, searching for a target. Men on motorcycles and men and women in private cars raced by. Everyone on the flyover knew they were under a.s.sault, but there was nowhere to turn off until the next off ramp more than a kilometer farther on. Vehicles. .h.i.t one another as they fought to get out of the way of the slaughter, and Yadava, operating on one part training to three parts adrenaline, just ran out into the midst of all this madness.
Fifty meters back, he saw a yellow Mazda SUV slam hard into the waist-high protective barrier on the edge of the road. It hit with such speed that it then flipped over the side and spun through the air, almost as if in slow motion, before it hurtled some forty feet down toward the heavy traffic on the service road below the flyover.
A motorcycle approached Yadava. It was nearly identical to the one that had pa.s.sed him a minute before, and the man behind the driver held a rifle with a large drum magazine.
The driver saw the uniformed CISF constable with the black sub-gun standing in the traffic, but he could not warn his gunner, so as Yadava raised his MP5 to fire, the biker slid his Suzuki onto the ground. He rolled off of it, and then slid with his partner.
Yadava raised his ring sight over the man with the Kalashnikov and he fired. Now his training in the paramilitaries was put to good use. His shots tore up the road and then the man, blood fountained from the terrorist"s salwar kameez. The man in the street dropped his AK and then stilled, and Yadava moved his sights to the driver.
The CISF warned their jawans that Pakistani terrorists, as this man certainly was, often wore suicide vests that they would detonate if they faced capture, and the CISF therefore instructed their men to offer no quarter to a terrorist operative when caught in the act.
Young Kiron Yadava did not weigh the pros and cons of shooting an unarmed man. As long as the Islamist lived on this earth he was a danger to India, the country the constable had sworn to protect to his dying breath.
Kiron Yadava emptied his weapon into the man lying in the street.
As he reloaded his MP5, he turned to begin running after the other bike, but he heard the detonation of a hand grenade in the heavy traffic behind him. He knew instantly there was a third motorcycle still behind him. It would be approaching in moments, and it was up to him to stop the attack.
Abdul Ibrahim fired his Makarov pistol into the chest of the driver of a pa.s.senger van. The driver slumped to the floor, his foot came off the brake, and this caused the big vehicle to rear-end a Fiat with a dead husband and wife in the front seat. In the back three rows of the van, eight Europeans in business suits recovered from the crash and then cowered at the sight of the terrorist climbing off his bike, and then, with an incredible expression of peace on his face, pulling a pipe bomb out of a bag hanging from his chest.
Ibrahim looked down to his lighter, careful to put the flame on the tip of the short wick of his bomb, lest he martyr himself accidentally. He lit his wick, replaced the lighter in his pocket, and then reached back to toss the bomb under the van.
Just then he heard the rat-a-tat of a submachine gun firing up the street. He turned to look at the source of the fire, he knew his men carried heavier rifles. He saw the Indian CISF man, saw the flash of fire from his weapon, and then felt his body buckle and spasm with the impact of the bullets. He was. .h.i.t twice in the pelvis and groin, and he fell to the ground, on top of his improvised explosive device.
Abdul Ibrahim shrieked "Allahu Akbar!" just before his pipe bomb detonated into his chest, blowing him to bits.
Constable Kiron Yadava came upon the bullet-riddled bodies of the final two men in the terror cell a few minutes later. The pair had tried to run their Suzuki motorcycle through a hasty CISF roadblock just before the last off ramp before Electronics City. The eight constables stood over the dead men, but Yadava screamed at them. He told them to stop admiring their handiwork and to help him tend to the two dozen or so scenes of bloodshed all the way down the southbound lane of the ten-kilometer stretch of the Bangalore Elevated Tollway.
Together these men, followed soon by hundreds of other first responders, spent the entire day treating survivors of the ma.s.sacre.
Riaz Rehan was in his office at ISI headquarters in the Aabpara district of Islamabad when his television reported a huge traffic accident in Bangalore. It meant nothing to him at first, but when the size of the carnage was relayed by the news anchor, Rehan stopped his other work and sat in rapt attention at his desk, watching the television. Within minutes there was confirmation that there had been a gun battle and within minutes more terrorists were being blamed for a ma.s.sacre.
Rehan had awoken furious with the LeT cell for not executing the night before, but now he was ecstatic. He could not believe these reports out of Bangalore. He had hoped for a casualty count of twenty with at least ten dead, perhaps some news footage of a burning guard post or a crater next to a building. Instead his five-man-strong cell, with only five rifles and a few small explosives, had managed to ma.s.sacre sixty-one people and injure an incredible one hundred forty-four.
Rehan beamed with pride and made a mental note that when he became president of Pakistan he would have a statue built in honor of Abdul Ibrahim, but he also realized the attack had actually done more damage than he wanted. LeT would be targeted with renewed vigor by not only the Indians but also the Americans. The pressure on Pakistan"s government to root out LeT would be twice what he"d expected. Rehan knew that the US/Pakistani Intelligence Fusion Center would be working overtime now and shifting their workload toward LeT.
Rehan did not panic. Instead he reached out to his LeT contacts and told them he would take over as project manager for the next operation, and it would need to be moved up on the calendar. Forces opposed to LeT in his government, forces who were allied with the United States, would begin rounding up the usual suspects after this attack, and Rehan knew that every day before phase two of his plan to bring Pakistan and India to the brink of war would increase the chance that Operation Saker would be somehow compromised.
Valentin Kovalenko was nothing like his father. Where Oleg had been big and fat, thirty-five-year-old Valentin looked like a gym rat. He was thin but muscular; he wore a beautiful tailored suit that Laska had no doubt cost more than the car Oleg drove back in Moscow. Laska knew enough about luxury items to recognize that Valentin"s fashionable Moss Lipow eyegla.s.ses cost more than three thousand dollars.
Another stark departure from the demeanor of his father, especially the version of his father that Laska remembered from Prague, was that Valentin seemed quite friendly. Upon his arrival in Laska"s suite just after ten p.m., he"d complimented the Czech on his tireless philanthropy and support for the causes of the downtrodden, then he"d taken a chair by the fireplace after politely turning down the offer of a snifter of brandy.
When both men were settled in front of the fire, Valentin said, "My father says he knows you from your days in Prague. That is all he has said, and I have made it a point to not ask him for any more information than that." His English was spoken with a noticeable British accent.
Laska shrugged. Valentin was being polite, and it might even be true, but if Laska"s plan was to go forward, there was not a chance in the world that Valentin Kovalenko would not look into the past of the famous Czech. And there was no chance he would not find out about Laska"s duties as a mole. There was no point in hiding it. "I worked for your father. Whether or not you know that yet, you will soon enough. I was an informant, and your father was my handler."
Valentin smiled a little. "My father impresses me sometimes. Ten thousand bottles of vodka down the hatch and the old man still can keep secrets. That is b.l.o.o.d.y impressive."
"He can," agreed Laska. "He did not tell me anything about you. My other sources in the East, via my Progressive Nations Inst.i.tute, were the ones who told me about your position in SVR."
Valentin nodded. "In my father"s day we"d send men and women to the gulag for revealing that information. Now I will just send an e-mail to internal state security mentioning the leak and they will file the e-mail away and do nothing."
The two men watched the fireplace in the huge suite for a moment. Finally Paul said, "I have an opportunity that I think will interest your government greatly. I would like to suggest an operation to you. If your agency agrees, I will only work with you. No one else."
"Does it involve the United Kingdom?"
"It involves the United States."
"I"m sorry, Mr. Laska, but that is not my area of operations, and I am very busy here."
"Yes, being a.s.sistant rezident. But my proposal will make you rezident in your pick of nations. What I am offering is that important."
Valentin smiled. An affectation of amus.e.m.e.nt, but Laska could see a glint in the boy"s eyes that reminded him of his father in his younger years.
Valentin Kovalenko asked, "What is it you are proposing, Mr. Laska?"
"Nothing less than the destruction of the American President, Jack Ryan."
Valentin"s head rose. "You"ve given up hope for your friend Edward Kealty?"
"Completely. Ryan will be elected. But I have hope that he will not set foot in the Oval Office to begin his second term."
"That is a great hope you have there. Give me reason to share this hope."
"I have a privately acquired file . . . a dossier, if you will, of a man named John Clark. I am sure you know who he is."
Valentin c.o.c.ked his head, and Laska tried but could not read into the gesture. The Russian said, "I might know that name."
"You are just like your father. Not trusting."
"I am like most all Russians in that regard, Mr. Laska."
Paul Laska nodded in recognition of the truth of the comment. In reply he said, "This exercise will not require your trust. John Clark is a close confidant of Jack Ryan. They have worked together, and they are friends."
"Okay. Please continue. What does the file say?"
"Clark was a CIA a.s.sa.s.sin. He did the bidding of Jack Ryan. Ryan signed a pardon for this. Do you know what a pardon is?"